TROOPS fought armed insurgents in southern Albania yesterday in the first major clash after three days of emergency rule. The army pulled back from fierce fighting near a village to the east of the Adriatic port of Sarande, eyewitnesses said.
Four villagers and at least two soldiers were reported wounded in exchanges that lasted about 40 minutes. Rebels drove a captured tank through the streets of Sarande.
Fears that the Albanian government was preparing military action against rioters in the south had been heightened by its refusal yesterday to accept Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) mediation.
Mr Tritan Shehu, Albania's Foreign Minister, declared the situation in the Adriatic port town of Vlore to be "totally out of control", with two men in their 30s killed by gunfire yesterday and many others wounded.
Of possible OSCE mediation, Mr Shehu said bluntly: "Our opinion is that this is not the time. Order must be restored first."
Three towns in the south Vlore, Sarande and Delvine - are now believed to be outside the control of the Tirana government and in the hands of a rag-tag band of insurgents who appear to be without unified leadership.
Vlore, a port city of 80,000 people on the Adriatic, was believed to be completely surrounded and the desperate food situation was reported to have led to attacks on wheat depots.
The international media meanwhile are stranded in Tirana and forced to rely on second-hand information. Reporters attempting to travel south have been turned back at checkpoints set up on all roads leading out of the city.
In Tirana people were going about what business they had left in a country which was Europe's poorest even before most of its people lost their life savings in fraudulent investment schemes.
The scene at the city's tiny airport yesterday afternoon was pitiful as more than 100 men touted for business as taxi-drivers from the 20 or so passengers who had arrived on the afternoon flight from Vienna. The men were obviously desperate to earn money and openly begged to drive the foreigners on one of the most bizarre airport-to-city journeys on earth.
All along the route the landscape is pock-marked with thousands of concrete bunkers shaped uncannily like the prehistoric beehive huts in the south-west of Ireland. Some are used as hen houses and others as dark chambers for the cultivation of mushrooms, but they resulted originally from the paranoia of a mad dictator.
Enver Hoxha ushered Albania out of the real world during his long reign, making overtures first to the West and then to the Communist powers of the USSR and China as he went down his own broad of social experimentation.
Albania suffered almost total isolation under Hoxha - with the current President, Mr Sali Berisha, a heart surgeon, one of the few allowed to visit the West.
Hoxha in his latter days was overcome with an irrational fear of invasion from the air and the bunkers sprang up like the mushrooms which are now grown in them. Then came the collapse of European communism and the raising of hopes for the continent's poorest, most backward, and most unfortunate people. These hopes now appear to have been dashed.
A dictatorship which described itself as communist has been replaced by a dictatorship which describes itself as capitalist. President Berisha has not started building bunkers yet although his country now appears to be on the brink of civil war.
As we arrived at our destination in the central Skenderbeg Square in the spring sunshine yesterday, the driver who had feigned ignorance of all languages other than Albanian, suddenly whispered in Italian: "Il nostro Presidente e pazzo" ("Our President is mad").
He then lapsed back into his desperate silence.
Mr Berisha's "Democratic" party, which won elections widely believed to have been rigged, says the insurgents are "communist bandits acting on behalf of the secret service of a foreign state". The foreign state has not been named.
